This is just a quick note for my future reference. I needed all items with the class “uppercase” to be converted to uppercase, and I thought it would work with just some CSS:

.uppercase { text-transform:uppercase; }

This makes the items appear uppercase, but when the page is posted it actually sends the values exactly as the user typed. They’d type in “lower“, it looks like “LOWER” on screen, but gets posted as “lower“.

In many cases I could just convert the value in my PL/SQL code, but in cases where I was using Apex tabular forms, I don’t know a simple way to intercept the values before the insert occurs.

Most places I’ve worked at allow employees to use any of the major browsers to do their work, but mandate an “SOE” that only supports IE, presumably because that generates the most amount of work for us developers. I’d conservatively estimate that 99% of the rendering bugs I’ve had to deal with are only reproducible in IE. (cue one of the thousands of IE joke images… nah, just do a Google Image search, there’s plenty!)

Anyway, we had a number of these rendering issues in Apex on IE8, IE9 and IE10, mainly in edge cases involving some custom CSS or plugins. In some cases I was never able to reproduce the issue until we noticed that the user had inadvertently switched “IE Compatility Mode” on:

We told them to make sure the icon was grey, like this:

– and most of the issues went away.

Since there’s nothing in our Apex application that requires compatibility mode, we would rather the option not be available at all. To this end, we simply add this code to all the Page templates in the application:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">

This is added just after the <head> tag, like this:

Now, the compatility button doesn’t appear at all – one less choice for users and less bug reports to deal with:

For more information, see this stackoverflow question and read all the answers. Note that it may be better to add this as a header in the response generated by your web server. In our case it was simpler to just add it into the html.

I’ve added this script to our toolbelt for future upgrades. We have a friendly “System is under maintenance, sorry for any convenience” web page that we want to show to users while we run upgrades, and we want it to be shown even if we’re just doing some database schema changes.

So I took the script from here and adapted it slightly, here’s our version:

However, if we run the f100.sql script to deploy a new version of the application, we don’t need to run the “set available” script since the redeployment of the application (which would have been exported in an “available” state already) will effectively make it available straight away.

I have a simple tabular form with a numeric “sort order” column. I want the value of this column to be defaulted automatically, based on the maximum value of the rest of the records on the screen. Unfortunately the builtin Apex default type for columns in a tabular form can only be based on an Item, or a PL/SQL expression or function. I didn’t want to make a database call to get the maximum value because the user may have added multiple records which have not yet been saved to the database.

I tried basing the default on a hidden page item which I kept updated based on the values entered, but it seems the tabular form only gets the item’s value on page load and doesn’t re-examine the item’s value when you click the “Add” button. Instead, I had to turn to javascript and jQuery to get the job done.

1. Add a class to the tabular form column by setting the Element CSS Classes column attribute (I’ve used “sortorder” as the class name).

2. Add a javascript function to the page that searches for all the “sortorder” items, calculates the maximum value and adds 10, and assigns it to the last sortorder item on the page.

After trial and error I tracked down one potential cause of this error so I thought I’d share it in case it happens again. I’ll probably come across this again later and forget what the solution was and find this article.

In my case (Apex 4.2.4), the problem was caused by an invalid entry in the Column Name Aliases list of values. I was using a custom List of Values so that alternative names for the columns would be automatically mapped without the user having to select them every time. To do this, I had to edit the List of Values directly to add the alternative names; but I had mistyped one of the Return Values which must map to a real column name on the target table. Whenever I picked this column for an import, I’d get the “Data Loading Failed” error message. Correcting the return value resolved the issue.

In order to stop this happening again, I added the following check to my Apex QA script (this is run whenever the application is deployed):